I'm here in Las Vegas for a few days attending HP's Technology Forum where the company and its partners show off to about 7,000+ attendees (inluding HP employees) their latest enterprise solutions. The conference is also HP's largest ever technical training event, covering the company's commercial and enterprise business solutions.
After the media briefing, I talked to Scott Stallard, HP's vice president and general manager of enterprise storage and servers about his thoughts on the competitive landscape. To my surprise, the HP exec was pretty open to speak about it's competitors namely IBM, a bit Sun and a much lesser extent Dell. So picking on the Texas-based company was fairly entertaining as you will see after the jump! More to come on Sun later.

Dell next-generation blades are knock-offs of HP ones!

"Dell didn't even show up for the first generation of blades and if you look at the photographs that are out now on their new blades, it looks exactly like a c-Class BladeSystem. It even has the same little LCD display that we have. When you look at the front and the back rendering of this product, it's a copy, a knock-off of the c-Class... about 2 years late. So when they are working on that, we'll have other announcements on our blades", said Scott Stallard.

Blades doesn't leverage on Dell's strengths!

"Because one of the things you have to be able to do is what I call a value or solution sell with a low cost volume deployment.

When we talk to our customers about our bladed environment who want to migrate from racks or pedestal to do a data center consolidation, what you would want to do is some consulting, some site analysis, help them with their power and cooling, find the right applications workload, how do you provision these things, etc.

And then you want to stand back and the second step is to be able to take an order for those which is what I call a two-tier configurator i.e. being able to configure a blade, a chassis of blades and rack of chassis of blades. And that's a very complex configuration problem.

Dell has CDW or somebody else to do that work with a third party or a resellers. Which we do that too by the way", added Stallard.

Dell is a box mover not solution oriented... yet!

"With our service Factory Express which is a solution supply chain and not just a box mover: you could order for your company exactly what you want with your assets, your software, your patches and even third party hardware and software, and we can either show up at your remote site or your data center, ready to plug-in and turn on.
Then you need a really low cost way, as customers need more blades to get a new one like 'now'. And you don't want to pay a lot of money for a sales rep for something you can do on the web.
So if you think of that progression, that's really not their sales model. IBM and I have that solution selling motion. Of course, Dell have to try to do the same but it takes R&D, it takes software... so I don't know how do this stuff just getting it from third parties and reverse-auctions [like Dell does!]".